The impact of socioeconomic status on students’ achievement in the Middle East and North Africa: An essay using the TIMSS 2007 database

Educational achievement as measured by students’ performance in international tests is receiving scant attention in the educational research. The launch of these tests helped the educational community to better understand the factors underlying students’ achievement and guided the policy makers in their policies. However, Middle East and North African (MENA) countries were underrepresented in these discussions mainly because of data scarcity. Fortunately, Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) 2007 data provides data for 15 MENA countries for students at the eighth grade and for many MENA countries; this is the first time that such data is available. This chapter aims to present estimates of students’ family background over mathematics and science scores. The results show that students with abundant home resources perform better than those with less home resources. Moreover, expatriate students in Gulf countries perform better than natives.